Global Policy Forum

By Brooks Tigner*

Experts say the UN force in southern Lebanon is still too small and its mandate interpreted too narrowly to keep renewed conflict at bay. Without a change in its mandate or a change in attitude by its host government, the UN's peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon is doomed to ineffectiveness and cannot prevent another conflict in the war-weary country, say political and military experts familiar with the region's long-simmering problems.

UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, does not have the means or will to halt arms smuggling across the border from Syria and, moreover, it shies away from conflict with the Iran-backed Hizbollah faction, which is re-arming itself after last summer's brutal so-called rocket war with Israel, they said. "Iran is de facto a major player in the region and until that is tackled, UNIFIL remains an ineffectual force and deterrent," Kassem Ja'afar, a Lebanese diplomatic consultant in Qatar, said during a 13 March panel debate here organized by the Transatlantic Institute to assess UNIFIL's performance. "I wish the situation was brighter than that, but it isn't."

First created in 1978 to oversee Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon and establish order in the region, UNIFIL was given a wider mandate by the UN after the July-August rocket war to monitor the cessation of hostilities, support the Lebanese army as it deployed across southern Lebanon and oversee the safe return of displaced persons. It is also supposed to help the government in Beirut disarm and disband Lebanon's numerous armed militia groups. Italy, France and Spain are the lead nations, with each contributing two infantry battalions or their equivalent, while Indonesia, Ghana, India, Malaysia and Nepal have one battalion each stationed across southern Lebanon. With approximately 10,500 land forces in Lebanon and 1,800 marines involved in marine interdiction duties along its coast, UNIFIL is significantly larger than before the 2006 conflict between Hizbollah and Israel. It also has more robust assets in terms of artillery and tanks and is less passive than its former self.

As for Lebanese forces, the army has stationed fully a fifth of its forces - some 10,000 soldiers - across the southern region, with 8,000 of these stationed along the Syria-Lebanon border. "Ten thousand Lebanese army soldiers and more than 12,000 international ones in southern Lebanon is an impressive deployment," said panelist Dan Berkovich, research fellow at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. "UNIFIL battalions are becoming more aggressive in contrast to what we saw in the past. This is linked to the Lebanese government's growing assertion of its authority in southern Lebanon, although it still has a way to go to achieving that. But it prevents Hizbollah from acting as freely as it did before." Fellow panelist Andrea Nativi, analyst for Italy's Defense Ministry, agreed. "There has been a tendency to blame UNIFIL for the region's problems, but after 20 years, it is back in force with political backing. It is not a token force. It has tanks, artillery, APCs [armored personnel carriers] and an intelligence apparatus that more than meets the needs of just force protection," he said. "UNIFIL is still too small and its mandate still has too many strings attached to it, but the best UNIFIL we've had so far."

Improved, but still lacking

So much for the good news, however.

After highlighting the improvements of "UNIFIL Two" over "UNIFIL One," all three speakers pointed to the traps and policy paralysis that surround the UN force from all points of the compass. This does not augur well for the region's medium- or long-term stability, they insisted.

"Hizbollah continues to smuggle weapons into southern Lebanon under the nose of both UNIFIL and the Lebanese army," said Berkovich. "They are using the construction industry, for instance, to smuggle in material and to re-dig the tunnels and underground bunkers that caused such a problem for the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] last summer. This is not an optimistic scenario." Berkovich and the other speakers enumerated several reasons why, in their view, the arms keep flowing into the region. One is an apparent lack of will on Beirut's part to confront Hizbollah or to enforce the internationally agreed embargo on weapons flowing into southern Lebanon. "The Lebanese government is suffering a severe political crisis [due to parliamentary paralysis and fractious ethnic and religions tensions across the country] and it does not want conflict with Hizbollah," said Berkovich. Ja'afar shared that view, but took it even further. "The dismantling of Hizbollah's infrastructure in southern Lebanon has not taken place as called for by the ceasefire and the international community. It controls the region's schools, its hospitals, its welfare disbursements. And we have no idea of the level of arms being stocked there," he observed. Worse, he said, Hizbollah "has moved its veto [on action by the central government] from the south of Lebanon back to the center - the capital - where it uses its political clout [within the national parliament] to counter every move by [Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad] Siniora. Siniora can't appoint a janitor in southern Lebanon without consulting Hizbollah. I lived there and I can tell you that is the situation."

A "narrow" mandate

A second problem lies in UNIFIL's relationship with the Lebanese army with whom it must cooperate, as required by its UN mandate. For example, UNIFIL's rules of engagement forbid it to engage Hizbollah without coordinating first with the army. "The fact that UNIFIL is forced to coordinate its activities with the Lebanese army causes a lot of problems," observed Berkovich. "Why? Because the army does not see the necessity of blocking arms flows or disarming Hizbollah. Thus, it looks the other way each time Hizbollah smuggles arms into the region, which means that weapons continue to flow from Syria and Iran." That indifference - or caution - has seeped into UNIFIL too, he argued. "UNIFIL prefers to interpret its mandate in a very narrow way. The UN's resolution gives it the right to use force and to ensure that its operational territory is not used for hostile purposes," said Berkovich. "Yet it prefers to guide and train the Lebanese army rather than halt the smuggling and rearming that is taking place [by Hizbollah]. This is a fig leaf for inaction."

A third challenge for UNIFIL is operational: It has insufficient assets to patrol southern Lebanon's borders, and what assets it does have are concentrated inconsistently across its multi-national forces, according to Nativi. "A too-heterogeneous force is not best for this kind of situation [in southern Lebanon]," Nativi said. While declining to finger specific national units assigned to UNIFIL, he said "rapid reaction assets, communications and other technical capabilities are not the same across the territory under UNIFIL's command. Draw your own conclusions." In Nativi's view, UNIFIL is too small to carry out effective monitoring to prevent arms smuggling across southern Lebanon's border with Syria. Noting that UNIFIL has only four helicopters, used mainly for medical purposes, he said the force "would need a much bigger air component, including UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. There is discussion at the UN whether to deploy UAVs. I think UNIFIL should have them, but there's a feeling that even these small assets should not be allowed to fly in the skies above the region." Berkovich seconded that idea. "Along with the full cooperation of the Lebanese army, UNIFIL needs good intelligence. Without it, they are merely observers," he said.

A fourth and final obstacle facing UNIFIL is surely the most elusive of all: the moral indifference of the wider Arab world to the UN's presence. Explained Ja'afar: "There may be peace in southern Lebanon for now, but there is no loss of strategic advantage [for Hizbollah] whatever its actual physical losses [in manpower or material] were during last summer. Perceptions in the Middle East are far more important than the actual achievements of war. You can lose the entire war and still emerge as a hero. This has happened over and over again in the Middle East, and particularly when a conflict involves Israel. And as long as there are parties inside Lebanon whose loyalties remain with parties outside the country, the risk remains high that there will be another conflict there."

About the Author:Based in Brussels, Brooks Tigner has reported on European and transatlantic security and defense issues since 1992, with particular emphasis on NATO and the EU's rapidly evolving military and homeland security policies. He is a regular contributor to the US weekly, Defense News, and editor of SECURITY EUROPE, a new monthly newsletter focused on European homeland security policy, technology and business.